Jokowi Among Top 10 World Leaders on Facebook With 6 Million Followers

President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo, who was the governor of Jakarta at the time, and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg visited Tanah Abang market in South Jakarta on Oct.13, 2014. (Antara Photo/Muhammad Adimaja)

Jakarta. President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo joined Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump on the top 10 "World Leaders on Facebook" list, global public relations and communications firm Burson-Marsteller said on Friday (24/02).

Burson-Marsteller prepared a report which ranked world leaders based on their number of Facebook followers and engagement rate. The study analyzed 590 Facebook pages representing 169 governments which have a combined total of 311 million followers as of Feb. 1. In 2016, they published a total of 398,982 posts which have garnered 772 million interactions.

Facebook engagement rate is measured in interactions. On a Facebook page, that translates into likes, comments and shares of posts. It is a metric that social media marketers use to measure a brand, personality or company's effectiveness at engaging their audience.

Modi topped the listwith 40 million followers, followed by Trump with 20 million. Modi's institutional page, Prime Minister's Office India, ranked third with 13 million followers. Queen Rania of Jordan ranked in fourth place with 10 million Facebook followers. Meanwhile, Turkish president Rece Tayyip Erdogan ranked in fifth place with eight million followers.

President Jokowi ranked ninth with six million followers.

(Image courtesy of Burson-Marsteller)

Posts with videos uploaded directly to Facebook received the most interactions. Native video posts received an average of 4,847 interactions per post, including 824 shares and 623 comments and 297 reactions. The 47,739 Facebook videos posted on world leaders’ pages have been viewed 2.5 billion times with an average view count of 52,000.

Worldwide chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, Don Baer, said in a statement that the study reveals the impact of political communication on Facebook.

"This study offers an interesting perspective in seeing how corporate leaders take their lessons from world leaders by using Facebook. One of the ways to do it is by bringing a nuance of personality with the way they communicate," he said.

Chief executive of Burson-Marsteller in Europe, Middle East and Africa, Jeremy Gallbraith, said in the statement that the reason many resort to Facebook as a communication tool is because it is currently the biggest social network platform in the world.

"As the biggest social network, Facebook has considerable power and influence, and it is something that world leaders understand," he said.

Despite former US president Barack Obama’s low interaction rate, he was a trailblazer on Facebook. Last year, when Burson-Marsteller released the first edition of the study, Obama was at the top of the list with the most number of page likes at 46 million. By the time he had left office this January, he’d overshadowed all world leaders with 54 million followers on his personal page.

Modi, who became the most followed world leader on Facebook this year, also had the highest number of interactions, with 169 million in the last year.

The White House became the most visited institution on Facebook with four million check-ins — a feature allowing users to let friends know where they are — followed by the State House Uganda and Thailand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, each with 35,000 check-ins.

According to the report other Southeast Asian leaders also had a strong social media presence including Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia, who each had more than two million followers.